World Weather Roundup

Isn’t it rather embarrassing to have a news reporter that is so incredibly dim? Which channel is this? Maybe I am showing age somewhat, but I find I have less tolerance for ignorance as the years pass.

Jet stream forecast;
http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=glob_250
http://www.stormsurf.com/mdls/menu_wx.html

RBateman,
Look at the temperatuer distributions in July from UAH posted at Roger Pielke Sr.’s page: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/my-comments-on-the-university-of-alabama-at-huntsville-july-2010-lower-tropospheric-temperature-analysis/. There is pattern of warm regions in the upper midle lattitues separted by cold regions which you might expect if the Jet Stream is has a stronger than normal North:South component and is stable (or stuck depening on your point of view). I recall reading something a year ago that when the sun comes out of a minimum some odd things happen with the polar vortexes and the cold air at the poles which is normally at low pressure and just stays up there converts to a high pressure region and starts influencing weather in the temperate regions. We are certainly at this stage now with the solar cycle and a couple of years ago we had the lowest solar wind recorded and the height of the upper atmosphere was the lowest ever recorded. So if I were compentent enough to really look for a “why” of a stonger north south component of the jet stream, I’d look for a coupling of things happening at the poles (possibly driven by solar changes) with the big swings in the ocean temperature patterns.

While I struggle to comprehend some of the more complex descriptions of how the weather works, I tend to also resort to a very simple idea of how the “weaker sun” might effect things.
What I look for is land masses to cool more swiftly than the sea. After all, this is something we see on a daily basis by our coasts, when night’s “land breeze” gives way to a “sea breeze,” as the land warms more rapidly than the sea, and then see the opposite occur after sunset, as the land cools more rapidly than the sea.
In fact the sea has such an inertia that I expected to see the oceans effected little by the “weaker sun,” and for the PDO and AMO to go their merry way. In my simple way I looked for the “weaker sun’s cooling” to be most pronounced over land masses, which effects the Northern Hemisphere more than the Southern.
Lo and behold, last winter my simple-minded expectations seemed to verify, as the land masses in the Northern Hemisphere did seem to cool more than expected. However I am surprised to now see corridors of cold shooting northward over the smaller and more narrow Southern Hemisphere land masses, during their winter. I would have assumed the ocean’s effect would overwhelm the land’s effect, down there.
Regarding rbateman’s question, “What mechanism is at play causing the pressure cells to stop moving?”
My guess is that there is a bigger-than-normal contrast between the land-masses and oceans. That makes the jet stream loop north and south in a fashion that is conducive to blocking patterns. Less contrast would tend to encourage a nice, flat zonal flow in the jet stream, where storms hurry west to east at a nice clip.
It is the loopy jet stream that creates extremes, like the warmth in the far east and far west of Russia, as the middle has stayed pretty cold this summer.
Last winter the pattern got stuck in loops that brought cold right down to Florida, even as it was milder than normal in Eastern Canada and Greenland. Last winter we in New Hampshire were right on the fringe of the Canada-Greenland “warmth,” and there were actually more sub-zero mornings down in Virgina than up here in New Hampshire. It was pretty amazing how that pattern stuck and held and barely budged until spring.
Besides the contrast between land masses and oceans, this winter there is going to be quite a contrast between the Pacific, which is abruptly colder, and the Atlantic, which seems in the peak of an AMO warm-upswing. I suppose hurricanes could suck a lot of the Atlantic’s heat up between now and winter, but if they don’t, and the Atlantic stays warm, the jet stream will be encouraged to preform some remarkable loops, and we could have a pretty loopy winter.
I think it will be very interesting to watch. It has everything to do with cycles of the seas and the sun, I think, but we can expect the typical fuss about Global Warming.
The young gal in the video reminds me of one of my daughters. Give her a break. She’ll learn. And we’ve always known that, one of these days, we’d have to hand power over to a new generation.

“one likely contributor to the seriousness of the outbreak was a change in Russia’s laws, under Putin’s direction, that dismantled Russia’s fire protection service. This explanation is getting wider play as the fires continue to burn.
“In brief, the law privatized anti-forest fire activities. Russian state-employed fire rangers were eliminated on state land. Instead, those leasing the properties–Russian forest product companies–were “responsible” for detecting and fighting fires.
“But Russia being Russia, such “responsibility” is wholly theoretical.
…………..
“A part of the Russian Academy of Sciences predicted this immediately upon passage of the law. They were very prescient.”
http://seekingalpha.com/article/219409-russia-down-down-down-in-a-burning-ring-of-fire